22 maart 2012

Echoes from the Past:
Multiplicity of Voices in an Ars Nova Motet

Dr Jacques Boogaart

During the Late Middle Ages the art of polyphony reached a first culmination in the Ars nova motet. Not only are its three or four voices rhythmically and melodically very independent, in addition each voice sings a different text, but always in some way referring to a central subject which is hidden in the words of the tenor, the fragment from Gregorian chant on which the work is based. Machaut’s motet 7, J’ai tant mon cuer/Lasse! Je sui/Ego moriar pro te, is, like all his motets, a very condensed piece. The main subject of its texts is the remorse of a proud lady who had scorned her faithful lover and now regrets it but in vain. The work is full of citations and allusions to older works, literary and musical, which function as echoes from the past and greatly enrich the motet’s signification, as if secret secondary voices were added to the sounding ones. The attentive listener is at first dumbfounded by all this multiplicity in a piece which lasts no more than a few minutes. Far more time is needed to ponder and synthesize these voices - to shape them into a comprehensible whole - than it takes for the motet to be heard. Often, however, one powerful image tempers the centrifugal fury, binding together the different threads. In this motet it is the mirror, whose effects are perceptible in the texts and the stories they evoke as well as in the music, but which is nowhere present itself. Or is it?

Jacques Boogaart studied guitar and lute, French literature and musicology. He has taught medieval music and notation at the Instituut voor Muziekwetenschap of Utrecht University and since 2002 he is assistant professor at Amsterdam University. The specific topic of interest in his studies is the interaction between literature and music, and the evolution of music as an artistic object. Boogaart’s publications range from late-medieval music to the operas of Monteverdi, focusing especially on the works of Guillaume de Machaut, to which field he has contributed several substantial articles.